Greenshouting Isn't About Being Louder. That's the Part Most People Will Miss.

A few weeks ago I wrote about greenhushing. The quiet retreat. Companies that had plenty to say about sustainability four or five years ago, now saying nothing, because nothing feels safer than being accused of greenwashing. There's now a name for the opposite move. Greenshouting.

Credit to Creatives for Climate and B Lab for putting it together. The guide is more careful than the word suggests. It's built around accuracy, present-tense evidence, and showing the working. Patagonia publishing its impact data and admitting where it's fallen short. Tony's Chocolonely putting its financials and its progress in the same report. Read the actual thing (and I encourage everyone to) and it's a credibility argument, not a volume one.

But here's the problem. Most people won't read the actual thing. They'll read the word.

And the word says shout. After years of being told to be louder, and then getting punished for it, "greenshouting" is the wrong instruction to hand a market that's already nervous. One of the guide's own contributors said as much, that "shouting" risks being heard as a licence to over-claim. So the headline and the guidance are pulling in opposite directions, and headlines tend to win.

That matters, because a lot of people only catch the headline now, so this is the bit worth being clear about.

It was never about being louder. The brands that got into trouble weren't quiet. They were loud. Loud about commitments they couldn't evidence, targets they later walked back, "carbon neutral" doing work the footnotes couldn't support. Volume was never the issue. The gap between what was said and what could be backed up was.

Shouting louder doesn't close that gap. It widens it.

What closes it is evidence, and the confidence that comes from having it. Say what you've done. Show how you know. Be honest about what you haven't done yet, and clear about the difference between the two. That isn't a louder voice. It's a defensible one. And a company that can defend every claim it makes doesn't need to shout. It can simply speak, and be believed.

This is most of what we do at My Green Comms. Getting companies to the point where they can stand behind a claim before they make it, so that when they do speak, it holds.

Confidence and volume get confused all the time. They're not the same thing.